LangStop

Character Counter — Free Online Text Tool

Character Counter — Count Characters With and Without Spaces

Paste text and click COUNT CHARS for the total number of characters, or NO SPACES for the count with all whitespace removed. Useful for checking limits on meta descriptions, SMS messages, social posts, form fields and database columns. Counting happens in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

What each button counts

Button Counts Example: hello world
COUNT CHARS Every character, including spaces, tabs and line breaks Characters: 11
NO SPACES Characters after removing all whitespace (spaces, tabs, newlines) Characters (no spaces): 10
COUNT WORDS Runs of non-whitespace characters Words: 2
FULL STATS Words plus non-empty lines Words: 2, Lines: 1

How emoji and accented letters are counted

The counter reports the length of the text in UTF-16 code units — the same number JavaScript's string.length returns, and the number most web form maxlength attributes enforce.

  • Plain ASCII letters, digits and punctuation count as 1.
  • Most accented letters (é, ñ, ü) count as 1 when typed as a single character.
  • Most emoji count as 2 (😀 is one symbol but two code units), and emoji built from several parts — skin tones, flags, family emoji — count as more.
  • Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters in common use count as 1 each.

If a limit is enforced by a database column in bytes (for example MySQL VARCHAR with a byte limit, or a protocol header), the byte count in UTF-8 can be higher: é is 2 bytes and most emoji are 4.

Common character limits

Where Limit
SMS (GSM-7 alphabet) 160 characters per message; 70 if any character needs Unicode
Google search result title about 50–60 characters before truncation (pixel-based)
Meta description about 150–160 characters before truncation
X (Twitter) post 280 characters (some characters count double)

Limits that platforms measure in pixels or weighted characters can differ slightly from a raw count; treat the numbers above as guides.

Tips

  • Use NO SPACES for limits that exclude whitespace, such as some essay and translation briefs.
  • Paste several drafts into separate tabs to compare their lengths side by side.
  • Combine with REMOVE DUPES or SORT A-Z on the same page to clean a list before counting it.